The history of Mozilla and Firefox

On July 15, 2003, the Mozilla Foundation burst forth from Netscape, and in one fell swoop both created and cemented its preeminent position as the champion of The Open Web. A flurry of Firefox beta builds were released — first under the name of Phoenix, then Firebird, and eventually Firefox — and version 1.0 was finally released in November 2004. Thunderbird 1.0, which started life as Minotaur, was also released around the same time.

Today — eight years and three days after Mozilla was founded — some 400 million web surfers use Firefox, tens of millions use Thunderbird, and the state of the World Wide Web couldn’t be healthier. It’s hard to imagine now, with the Big Three browsers vying for your attention, but back in 2002 there was only one web browser: Internet Explorer. Thanks to Windows XP, IE6 owned 95% of the market, and to this day it is because of Windows XP’s enduring undeath that IE6 still has 10% of the world’s browser share. Mozilla’s early builds of Phoenix and Firebird started to gain traction in 2003, however, and by Firefox 1.0’s release in 2004 IE’s trend of domination had begun its steady reversal — and today, some nine years down the line, IE has only gained in market share twice: first with the release of IE7 and Vista, and then with the release of IE9 earlier this year.

It’s hard to put into words the contribution that Mozilla and its army of open source developers has made to the web, the internet, and thus society itself. If Mozilla hadn’t risen to challenge Microsoft, today’s two billion internet surfers might still be using IE6. You could go one step further and say that without Firefox — without the competition that drove an increase in JavaScript performance and the adherence to standards — we might even be living in a web without Google or Facebook or Twitter. It is thanks to Firefox that we have browsers that are capable of doing more than rendering images, basic CSS, and a scrolling marquee or two.

But, to reiterate, it’s hard to put Mozilla’s entire contribution into words — so we’re going to use pictures and words instead. Dive in to learn about the inauguration of the Mozilla Organization way back in 1998, the restructuring as Mozilla Foundation in 2003, the rapturous release of Firefox 1.0 and its worldwide launch parties, the creation and purpose of Mozilla Labs, and more!

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no mention on the million dollars $ that google is granting the mozilla foundation to keep the google search bar as the default option ? and no mention to the contributors to firefox employed by google. this to me is a time bomb in the hands of google for the millions of users of firefox that don’t want to be 0wned by google.

How did you get throught ten pages without mentioning where the “moz” part of Mozilla came from, its open source progenitor Mosaic, the first pubicly availabe browser. It was the foundation for IE as well. It was developed at UIUC (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign). It was used extensively by the High Energy Paticle Physics people at places like CERN and SLAC. The same programmers who wrote Mosaic went on to build Firefox and the rest of the programs you talk about. I remember the early days of Mosaic, and remember how exciting the whole concept and execution was for the time.

Well, personally, as much as I would hate to leave my beloved Firefox, it has gotten worse for me and it seems to be more and more unstable crashing more, I am almost tempted at getting Chrome…I am trying Mozilla, but make it use less RAM and be more stable again.

“The name is actually a rather puerile portmanteau of Mosaic and Killer” I’ve been using Mozilla since Netscape 0.9 beta in late 1994 and on through its many iterations and have never encountered this claim. The name Mozilla is a much more obvious portmanteau of Mosaic and Godzilla which I’ve always taken to mean Mosaic on roids. Do you have an additional cite beyond the reference in Wikipedia?

Very well written and beautifully told true story. Thank you and thanks Mozilla for making and keeping the web open.

Paul Kelly

The “mights” in paragraph three are rather fanciful. They appear to argue that no other significant web browsers would have appeared (what about Opera?), and that Microsoft would never have innovated beyond IE6. Which lets not forget was fairly innovative itself, and laid the foundations for Web 2.0 by making Ajax technologies possible.

Firefox used to be fast and small. Today Firefox is memory hunger (it used the most amount of memory of all Windows apps combined) and extremely slow (after running few hours).

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